Search Engines Don’t Take People Where the Search Engine Wants Them To Go

  We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible. Vince Lombardi       I was more impressed with the technology of search back in 1996 than I am today. When I first started playing around with Infoseek, Excite, Alta Vista, Hot Bot, Webcrawler,(well, Ok. Webcrawler and Open Text — not so much), and the other now rotting carcasses of failed search based ad delivery systems, I was blown away. Millions of pieces of data organized in a somewhat logical framework. Pages were often indexed within minutes. Scalability seemed endless as each day they all grew by hundreds of thousands of documents. You could cross reference. You could research. You could locate data that could fill the largest libraries on the planet from the comfort of your chair and without having to have a library card or pay late fees. It was amazing. Granted it was all text based. Period, (and even back then we all knew that would change), and the algorithms were far too elementary. I mean if a guy like me could figure them out —– weeeelllllll As for online promotion and search marketing, I actually did fall off a log once when I was a kid and placing on Infoseek for MLM, credit cards and online poker was easier. And took about as long. One of the first things that bothered me about search engines was the way they forced terrible conversions. Back then the index page reigned supreme and if your meta refresh tags were done properly,(what an oxy-moron), your domain name could pop up in top 10 for literally hundreds of related terms. Shoes.com could place #2 for gold shoelaces when the shoes.com/goldshoelaces.html page was three levels deep.

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Search Engines Don’t Take People Where the Search Engine Wants Them To Go